Driven to confront a past she once concealed, a Taiwanese daughter films her mother’s journey back to Sichuan, China, unearthing the weight of cross-strait history within their shared silence.
As Taiwan’s local identity awakened amid unresolved cross-strait conflicts, Chinese spouses faced increasing public scrutiny. After my childhood crush told me to “go back to China,” I spent years hiding my mother’s heritage to fit into a skeptical society.
Following his unexpected death, I returned home. Confronting long-buried memories, I turned my camera toward my mother, Lei Xia, for the first time. Tracing her late-1990s migration from Sichuan to Taiwan, I search through discarded archives and travel to her hometown, trying to find what I never thought to ask before.
But the more I search, the more I find absence: lost diaries, memories she refuses to revisit, a language she never taught me. The physical proof of her past is vanishing; documents are missing, and her Chinese household registration was cancelled decades ago. Unable to find her in the archive, I look to her.
The film captures the evolving relationship, acknowledging the limits of understanding within our shared history, and asks: when politics shape how we view one another, is it still possible to truly see the person standing before us?
